 |
| a classic view of the Taj Mahal |
One last reflection before leaving India. As I write this I am about forty hours away from leaving the hotel to travel to Indira Gandhi International Airport, at 2:00 am; we fly out at 5:00 am. Because Air India is currently in a state of turmoil after a pilots’ job action, all flights to Canada have been cancelled through to the end of October. About a month ago I made a lengthy trip to Bangalore from Mysore (distance about 150 km, travel time about four hours each way), and spent what seemed like an eternity in the Air India office making alternate arrangements. At the end of over four hours in the office (by which time I felt like I knew all the employees personally), I had new tickets, travelling back to Canada via Abu Dhabi on Air Etihad. A short journey of about three or four hours gets us to the Middle East, and after a wait of another three hours, we begin that sixteen hour flight to Toronto. Then more waiting, then Air Canada will bring us to Halifax; we arrive in the middle of the night local time, and will be picked up by a kind soul who will stay up all night first to meet us and then to drive us back, arriving in Sackville shortly after dawn. About forty hours of travel.
So forty hours of waiting, and forty hours of travel. There is, of course, a biblical significance to the number forty – we may be familiar with the forty days and nights of rain when Noah and his family were shut up in the ark with the animals. We may remember that Moses led the Israelites through the wilderness to the Promised Land for forty years. And Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days. There are other references too, and so forty comes to represent a time of testing and trial, a time of waiting and preparing, and a time of reflecting and journeying spiritually. So here, forty hours before my passage from India begins, I pause to reflect as well, especially on this journey which, I am sure, has and will continue to change me personally and spiritually, in profound and subtle ways.
We have been more than forty days – it has been two months since our departure from Canada, but allow me the image of forty hours as my opportunity to stop and reflect, to prepare to come home, to undertake the journey back to my own “promised land” (which is, indeed, the goal and aspiration of many Indians who see North America, and Canada particularly, as a promised land of freedoms, opportunities, and wealth). I will continue to reflect, and once at home, may then write further on my own sense of learning and growth, change and transformation, through my experience here.
For this writing, however, I turn to what may be the culmination of aspirations for many travellers to India, the Taj Mahal. It was, in many ways, the culmination of our trip at the end of two months, and if travel plans had not been disrupted, it would have been the visit on our final day before heading home.
Located in Agra, about 220 km from Delhi, getting to the Taj Mahal (the Crown Palace) is an undertaking indeed, and in this case, getting there may not be half the fun. Google map directions are simple: from Delhi, take the Taj Expressway, 211 km and 2 hours, 34 minutes of driving. However, that expressway is not yet open; it is scheduled to begin operations on August 2nd of this year, just after we arrive home. We went the old and usual way.
Our day began early, climbing on to the hotel fifteen-seater coach at 5:30 am. Traffic was light through Delhi at that time of day, and in no time at all (well, almost an hour), we were leaving Delhi behind us and moving out onto the highway at speeds of up to 60 and 70 km/hr in some stretches. With one stop about the half-way point for a washroom break, we made it to Agra in just under four hours, picked up our tour guide and headed for the Taj Mahal.
Was it what I expected? Was it worth the drive and the wait? Did it live up to its iconic and famous status?
So forty hours of waiting, and forty hours of travel. There is, of course, a biblical significance to the number forty – we may be familiar with the forty days and nights of rain when Noah and his family were shut up in the ark with the animals. We may remember that Moses led the Israelites through the wilderness to the Promised Land for forty years. And Jesus fasted in the wilderness for forty days. There are other references too, and so forty comes to represent a time of testing and trial, a time of waiting and preparing, and a time of reflecting and journeying spiritually. So here, forty hours before my passage from India begins, I pause to reflect as well, especially on this journey which, I am sure, has and will continue to change me personally and spiritually, in profound and subtle ways.
We have been more than forty days – it has been two months since our departure from Canada, but allow me the image of forty hours as my opportunity to stop and reflect, to prepare to come home, to undertake the journey back to my own “promised land” (which is, indeed, the goal and aspiration of many Indians who see North America, and Canada particularly, as a promised land of freedoms, opportunities, and wealth). I will continue to reflect, and once at home, may then write further on my own sense of learning and growth, change and transformation, through my experience here.
For this writing, however, I turn to what may be the culmination of aspirations for many travellers to India, the Taj Mahal. It was, in many ways, the culmination of our trip at the end of two months, and if travel plans had not been disrupted, it would have been the visit on our final day before heading home.
Located in Agra, about 220 km from Delhi, getting to the Taj Mahal (the Crown Palace) is an undertaking indeed, and in this case, getting there may not be half the fun. Google map directions are simple: from Delhi, take the Taj Expressway, 211 km and 2 hours, 34 minutes of driving. However, that expressway is not yet open; it is scheduled to begin operations on August 2nd of this year, just after we arrive home. We went the old and usual way.
Our day began early, climbing on to the hotel fifteen-seater coach at 5:30 am. Traffic was light through Delhi at that time of day, and in no time at all (well, almost an hour), we were leaving Delhi behind us and moving out onto the highway at speeds of up to 60 and 70 km/hr in some stretches. With one stop about the half-way point for a washroom break, we made it to Agra in just under four hours, picked up our tour guide and headed for the Taj Mahal.
 |
| on the steps to the platform and doorway in to the mausoleum |
I have to say yes, and then qualify that.
The first qualification comes from experiencing the Taj Mahal in what is literally the hottest weather I have ever experienced in my entire life. The temperature in Agra during our visit was 37 degrees Celsius, and it was sunny. The heat was almost life-taking, especially with the sun reflecting off the white marble of the Taj Mahal, including the platform on which it is built and on which we were walking. Hemp mats had been provided to walk on, but even through sandals (covered with light booties, like those worn in a hospital operating room) and walking on the mats, one could feel the heat coming up from the marble. It was almost impossible to walk on the marble itself, and I can only imagine what it would have felt like in bare feet. And that was not the only heat – it was also humid, and the humidex reading raised the temperature (in the Indian weather forecast, the “real feel” temperature) to a sweaty, deadening, sauna-like 50 degrees. Yes, fifty. Five zero. Within minutes of entering the Taj grounds, I was soaked from head to foot in sweat, as was almost everyone else on the grounds. Light clothing appeared dark, and colours appeared in darker shades as every shirt, sari, top, pair of pants, appeared as though they had been dragged through a swimming pool or caught in the rain, along with their wearers. It is, as you can believe and as I can attest, harder to focus on the immediate beauty and magnificence of a place as one moves through temperatures that feel like fifty in the shade, especially when there is no shade. I think my memory of the mausoleum itself, the room inside the Taj containing the tombs of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and his third wife Mumtaz Mahal for whom the structure was built, will be that of smell. India makes an impression on the nose – it assaults the sense of smell, and the Taj was no different in this respect. Stepping from the intense and humid heat into the huge vaulted room containing the tombs was worse than stepping into the men’s locker room of a Canadian hockey arena at the end of a game; the smell of sweat, raw, heavy, overpowering sweat, threatened to overwhelm me as I very quickly moved around the tombs with crowd, looking up at the huge dome overhead from the inside, and then back out to where I had left one student gasping for breath and feeling somewhat faint and nauseous both from early stages of heatstroke and also the overwhelming stench of so many human bodies sweating profusely in one almost airless chamber.
The first qualification comes from experiencing the Taj Mahal in what is literally the hottest weather I have ever experienced in my entire life. The temperature in Agra during our visit was 37 degrees Celsius, and it was sunny. The heat was almost life-taking, especially with the sun reflecting off the white marble of the Taj Mahal, including the platform on which it is built and on which we were walking. Hemp mats had been provided to walk on, but even through sandals (covered with light booties, like those worn in a hospital operating room) and walking on the mats, one could feel the heat coming up from the marble. It was almost impossible to walk on the marble itself, and I can only imagine what it would have felt like in bare feet. And that was not the only heat – it was also humid, and the humidex reading raised the temperature (in the Indian weather forecast, the “real feel” temperature) to a sweaty, deadening, sauna-like 50 degrees. Yes, fifty. Five zero. Within minutes of entering the Taj grounds, I was soaked from head to foot in sweat, as was almost everyone else on the grounds. Light clothing appeared dark, and colours appeared in darker shades as every shirt, sari, top, pair of pants, appeared as though they had been dragged through a swimming pool or caught in the rain, along with their wearers. It is, as you can believe and as I can attest, harder to focus on the immediate beauty and magnificence of a place as one moves through temperatures that feel like fifty in the shade, especially when there is no shade. I think my memory of the mausoleum itself, the room inside the Taj containing the tombs of Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and his third wife Mumtaz Mahal for whom the structure was built, will be that of smell. India makes an impression on the nose – it assaults the sense of smell, and the Taj was no different in this respect. Stepping from the intense and humid heat into the huge vaulted room containing the tombs was worse than stepping into the men’s locker room of a Canadian hockey arena at the end of a game; the smell of sweat, raw, heavy, overpowering sweat, threatened to overwhelm me as I very quickly moved around the tombs with crowd, looking up at the huge dome overhead from the inside, and then back out to where I had left one student gasping for breath and feeling somewhat faint and nauseous both from early stages of heatstroke and also the overwhelming stench of so many human bodies sweating profusely in one almost airless chamber.
 |
| magnificent white polished marble |
 |
| the Taj Mahal. is much bigger than it appears |
 |
| excerpts from the Qur'an |
Built by a Mughal monarch, the Taj is an Islamic building with Hindu elements, combining the typical middle eastern domed form with Persian and Indian influences. The gardens surrounding it are typically of Muslim design, and represent the movement from the profane sphere outside the gates to the sacred and powerful centre suggested by the building itself. There is a suggestion of paradise itself in the lush green grass, the evergreen trees and the water channels and pools. Even in the presence of death, as the tomb itself declares, there is still life.
 |
| inlaid semi-precious stones in the marble add detail |
Such a magnificent structure was also a political statement.
In a predominantly Hindu culture, the Taj – as other Moslem structures in India, including Humayan’s Tomb and the Qutub Minar in Delhi, and the Gol Gumbaz mausoleum in Bijapur, which I also visited – the might of Moslem rulers from the tenth to seventeenth centuries was declared in buildings of magnificent height, solidity, grandeur, size. This is perhaps echoed in the Arabic texts which adorn the Taj Mahal; selected from the Qur’an, the texts reflect themes of judgement and seem to hint at the need to adopt the submissive posture (Islam means submission) and surrender to the religion that accompanied the conquerors of northern and central India in this time period.
All too soon (and yet not too soon, given the heat and the crowds) we were on our way out. Electric carts and buses ferry visitors back to the visitor reception area, and from there we found our coach. I must admit that, after two months in India, I have lost a little of my Canadian gentleness and politness; ambushed by souvenir vendors, which is not unexpected, I surprised both myself and an Indian student from Mount Allison as we walked to the bus. I was in the middle of a conversation when a vendor came up close to me, thrusting a book or postcards or other printed material almost right into my face; before he even had a chance to speak, I found myself saying, with real attitude, “I’m talking here!” and giving a dismissive wave of my hand. I think I shocked myself, and I know I shocked the student I was with, who sputtered “I didn’t expect that from you, but that was impressive!” I didn’t expect it from myself, but in a very aggressive northern Indian culture, the aggressive stance I took served to send the vendor away quickly; no second attempt to sell material to me was made!
After a delicious lunch of northern Indian cuisine (in an air conditioned restaurant), and a shorter visit to Agra’s Red Fort, virtually a walled city and seat of power from the tenth to sixteenth centuries, we climbed aboard the coach for the return trip to Delhi. After almost two hours we finally got out of Agra, a city of about two million, and after more than six hours we were back in the hotel in Delhi, exhausted and exhilarated.
All too soon (and yet not too soon, given the heat and the crowds) we were on our way out. Electric carts and buses ferry visitors back to the visitor reception area, and from there we found our coach. I must admit that, after two months in India, I have lost a little of my Canadian gentleness and politness; ambushed by souvenir vendors, which is not unexpected, I surprised both myself and an Indian student from Mount Allison as we walked to the bus. I was in the middle of a conversation when a vendor came up close to me, thrusting a book or postcards or other printed material almost right into my face; before he even had a chance to speak, I found myself saying, with real attitude, “I’m talking here!” and giving a dismissive wave of my hand. I think I shocked myself, and I know I shocked the student I was with, who sputtered “I didn’t expect that from you, but that was impressive!” I didn’t expect it from myself, but in a very aggressive northern Indian culture, the aggressive stance I took served to send the vendor away quickly; no second attempt to sell material to me was made!
After a delicious lunch of northern Indian cuisine (in an air conditioned restaurant), and a shorter visit to Agra’s Red Fort, virtually a walled city and seat of power from the tenth to sixteenth centuries, we climbed aboard the coach for the return trip to Delhi. After almost two hours we finally got out of Agra, a city of about two million, and after more than six hours we were back in the hotel in Delhi, exhausted and exhilarated.
 |
| yes, at fifty degrees it was that hot, and I was that sweaty |
So now comes my passage from India, and the first forty hours, or perhaps forty days, in Canada, will be a time of reflecting, processing, re-adjusting and determining how India has changed me. I have seen some tremendous growth in some of the students; we have had some wonderful discussions about culture, history, religion, and this morning a few of us will take an autorickshaw only a few kilometres through the streets of Delhi to visit the Lotus Temple, a Baha’i worship centre designed in the 1980s by an Iranian-born Canadian architect. Like the Taj, clad in polished white marble, it is designed to appear from outside like a large lotus blossom opening up. Inside it is intended as a large, open, place of meditation worship in which silence is strictly enforced. I look forward to the silence, as I also look forward to silence, open spaces, moderate temperatures and familiar friends in Sackville. See you there.
 |
| surrounded by gardens, the Taj Mahal really is that magnificent |
No comments:
Post a Comment